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Those intrepid Googlers have been taking their cameras on more adventures: now you can take a run down the Colorado River Rapids on StreetView. Only mapped in 1869 and now America’s most endangered river, the Colorado has flowed through the western desert for 6 million years—in turn, forming the Grand Canyon. As well as running…
Next time your weather forecast predicts the blizzard of the century, you could gaze at this gorgeous weather visualization and find where in the world you should be vacationing. (Spoiler: it’s probably California.) The designers at Raureif, masterminds behind a successful weather app, have gone analog—packing a whole year’s worth of global weather into one…
The fateful day has come: Amazon is upping the price of its Prime membership. From April 17th, a year of Prime will cost $99 a year, up $20 from the current $79. Amazon has also changed the price its student members will pay, now asking for $49 a year. Its Prime Fresh membership will cost…
Meet Lydia, the shark who crossed the mid-Atlantic ridge, sketched a self-portrait with her tracking data, and helped age bourbon into a smooth temptation for on-board researchers. Lydia is a 14-foot (4.4-meter) great white shark who was caught and tagged off the coast of Florida in March 2013. The transponder Ocearch placed on Lydia broadcasts…
Dual booting is the latest mobile fad, and by all accounts it won’t be long before it arrives: according to Huawei, the first examples will be available in the US as early as this spring. Speaking to TrustedReviews, Huawei’s chief marketing officer, Shao Yang, explained that the company will release a phone combing Android and…
Desperate times, desperate measures: the Times of India is reporting that Microsoft is starting to give its Windows Phone OS away to phone manufacturers for free. The report claims that two Indian phone manufacturers will have the usual licence fee for Windows Phone waived as they roll out new handsets toting the OS. “For our…
In this modern age, there aren’t many sleeping beauties to wake, dragons to fight or treasures to hunt. But there are plenty of ageing family members whose Wi-Fi needs fixing—and that’s the tack this animated fairy tale takes. Mike Lacher wrote the wonderful fairy tale-cum-article ‘In which I fix my girlfriend’s grandparents’ Wifi and am…
These days we take design on computers for granted, but 30 years ago we were still surrounded by low-res screens, clunky interfaces and command prompts. Way back then, though, was when Apple stole the lead and became the choice of creatives everywhere. This video describes how the Apple Laserwriter—a printer, of all things—cemented Apple as…
Rawore’s “Industrial Sands” is pure texture as foreground, a slow roil of granulated sound running at length — like a sour pipe organ heard through a veil of vinyl surface noise. It’s sound as fabric, to be enjoyed not for some pre-determined melodic procession but for slight variations playing out in realtime. Track originally posted…
Here’s Nikon’s new top interchangeable-lens compact. The Nikon 1 V3 is a mirrorless camera that hopes to break from the mold by being simpler than the rest. Last year, the company completely redesigned the V2, adding a more substantial grip to the V1’s point-and-shoot-like body. Now, Nikon is ditching that new design—sort of. The grip…
Mixing a manic first person prelude with a grotesquely deformed claymation style reminiscent of Adam Jones’ work for Tool, animator Sunshaku Hayashi delivers a hypnotizingly frantic story of police brutality, death, and zombied rebirth. And how to make all of it out of little balls of clay.
This simulation of a flight through the known universe shows “the real positions and images of the galaxies that have been mapped so far” according to the Galaxy and Mass Assembly catalogue. While the positions of galaxies are spot on, they have been made bigger for visual purposes. At high speed, the Universe looks like…
If you reverse the process in one of those enlightening How It’s Made videos you get a fantastically funny How It’s Unmade parody series. This particular comedic episode shows how a delicious Oreo is extracted to provide half the United States with flour and harvested for cocaine, gunpowder, cocoa and sugar by wizards. It’s hilarious…
It’s the unicorn of the sea. The Billfish Report is calling these photos the first ever pictures of the extremely rare albino blue marlin. The mystical creature replaces the shiny blue and silver skin of typical blue marlins for a pure white that looks so striking in the ocean. Captain Juan Carlos Zamora with Carlos…
A disturbing series of headlines made their way around the internet this week. “Artificial Light Is Now Harming Rain Forests,” read one at Vice News. Smithsonian went with the more sedate, “Restoring Cut Rainforests Might Not Work Well If There’s Light Pollution Nearby.” That’s bad news for rain forests! Except it’s not entirely accurate. To…
Animation artist Caleb Wood recently took to the blank wall of Duluth’s Prøve Gallery to free-hand a series of teensy drawings. The installation looks like bunch of quirky hieroglyphics until you see this awesome clip of them in motion and then—it’s alive! First, take a look at a few of the still shots from Wood’s…
Human civilization has littered the natural terrain with sprawling megastructures too big to be entirely seen from the ground. But when seen from above, isolated from their surroundings—as in the work of Jenny O’Dell—these vast tangles of organized chaos will wreak even more havoc on your sense of scale. O’Dell has been using satellite imagery…
This has to be the most perfect lip-sync job I’ve ever seen. Heck, if somebody told me these two were actually singing Frozen’s Love Is an Open Door I would totally buy it. I’m flabbergasted by how well they do it. And the daughter not giving a damn is the perfect cherry to this sugary…
A group of USC archaeologists received an unusual request. Their services would be required to dig up several large mammals—but not the Ice Age fossils that dot the L.A. landscape. They needed to unearth three horses buried under a racetrack. Hollywood Park was built as a lavish horse-racing facility in 1938 with investors such as…
If you’ve ever secretly believed that you deserve a place named after you, then you have come to the right corner of the internet. This handy little app finds every street, river, garden, park, castle, or cave with your name already on it. Can’t you already do this with Google Maps, you ask? No, Google…
